Jem Read Free

first of the year, and I wangled it. Before then I was teaching the stuff at my alma mater . . . among other subjects; we didn't have much of an extrasolar department. It's a small school, and it fell on hard times even while I was still an undergraduate. Well? What about it?"
    "About what?"
    "Were you creaming? Or do you want a grant for a manned trip to Kung's Star?"
    "I do! Christ, yes, I do, I do."
    She took his hand in one of hers, patted it with the other. "You may regard it as settled. Hello, what's this?"
    "But—"
    "I said settled." She was no longer looking at him; something had caught her attention. They had come to a large park, and off to their right was a mall leading up to a monument. Flanking the entrance to the mall were two heroic groups of bronze statuary.
    Dalehouse followed her toward them, feeling dazed as well as hung over; it had not sunk in yet. "I suppose I ought to submit a proposal," he said tentatively.
    "You bet. Send me a draft first before you put it through channels.” She was examining the bronzes. "Will you look at this stuff!"
    Dalehouse inspected them without interest. "It's a war memorial," he said. "Soldiers and peasants."
    "Sure, but it isn't that old. That's a tommy gun that soldier is holding . . . and there's one on a motorbike. And look— some of the soldiers are women."
    She bent down and inspected the Cyrillic lettering. "Damn. Don't know what it says. But it's the workers and peasants welcoming liberators, right? It has to be the last of the Big Ones—World War Two. Let's see, this is Bulgaria, so that must be the Red Army chasing the Germans out and all the Bulgarians bringing them flowers and hearty fraternal-solidarity handshakes and glasses of clear spring water. Wow! Jesus, Danny, both my grandfathers fought in this war, and one grandmother—two on one side, one on the other."
    Dalehouse looked at her with amusement and fondness, if not full comprehension; it was strange to find anyone who took such an interest in actual foot-slogging fighting these days, when everyone knew that war was simply priced out of the market for any nation that wanted to survive. "What about your other grandmother? Some kind of slacker?"
    She looked up at him for a moment. "She died in the bombings," she said. "Hey, this is fun."
    The bronzes were certainly military enough for any war fan. Every figure was expressing courage, joy, and resolution in maximal socialist-realist style. They had been sculptured to fit in foursquare oblong blocks, with all the figures fitted into each other to conform; they looked a lot like a box of frozen sardines writhing around each other. Margie's interest in the sculpture was itself attracting interest, Dalehouse saw; the gendarmes had reached the end of their beat and were passing nearby on the return, watching benignly.
    "What's so much fun about soldiers?" he asked.
    "They're my trade, dear Dan. Didn't you know? Marjorie Maude Menninger, Captain, USA, late of West Point, or late of the practically late West Point, as I sometimes say. You should see me in uniform." She lighted another cigarette, and when she passed it to him for a drag he realized she had not been smoking tobacco.
    She held the smoke, then exhaled it in a long plume. "Ah, those were the days," she said dreamily, gazing at the bronzes. "Look at that prunt holding the baby up in the air. Know what he's saying to the other soldier? 'Go ahead, Ivan. I'll hold the kid while you rape her mommy; then you hold the kid and it's my turn.' “
    Dalehouse laughed. Encouraged, Margie went on. "And that young boy is saying, 'Hey, glorious Red Army soldier, you like my sister? Chocolate? Russki cigaretti?' And the WAC that's taking the flowers from the woman, she's saying, 'So, comrade! Stealing agricultural produce from the people's parks! Make no mistake about it, it's a long time in the camps for you!' Course, by the time the Soviets got here the Germans were finished anyhow, but—"
    "Margie," he